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Pandera & Dagster

The dagster-pandera integration library provides an API for generating Dagster Types from Pandera dataframe schemas. Like all Dagster types, dagster-pandera-generated types can be used to annotate op inputs and outputs.

Using Pandera with Dagster allows you to:

  • Visualize the shape of the data by displaying dataframe structure information in the Dagster UI
  • Implement runtime type-checking with rich error reporting

Limitations​

Currently, dagster-pandera only supports pandas and Polars dataframes, despite Pandera supporting validation on other dataframe backends.

Prerequisites​

To get started, you'll need:

  • To install the dagster and dagster-pandera Python packages:

    pip install dagster dagster-pandera

  • Familiarity with [Dagster Types](/api/python-api/types

Usage​

The dagster-pandera library exposes only a single public function, pandera_schema_to_dagster_type, which generates Dagster types from Pandera schemas. The Dagster type wraps the Pandera schema and invokes the schema's validate() method inside its type check function.

import random

import pandas as pd
import pandera as pa
from dagster_pandera import pandera_schema_to_dagster_type
from pandera.typing import Series

from dagster import Out, job, op

APPLE_STOCK_PRICES = {
    "name": ["AAPL", "AAPL", "AAPL", "AAPL", "AAPL"],
    "date": ["2018-01-22", "2018-01-23", "2018-01-24", "2018-01-25", "2018-01-26"],
    "open": [177.3, 177.3, 177.25, 174.50, 172.0],
    "close": [177.0, 177.04, 174.22, 171.11, 171.51],
}


class StockPrices(pa.DataFrameModel):
    """Open/close prices for one or more stocks by day."""

    name: Series[str] = pa.Field(description="Ticker symbol of stock")
    date: Series[str] = pa.Field(description="Date of prices")
    open: Series[float] = pa.Field(ge=0, description="Price at market open")
    close: Series[float] = pa.Field(ge=0, description="Price at market close")


@op(out=Out(dagster_type=pandera_schema_to_dagster_type(StockPrices)))
def apple_stock_prices_dirty():
    prices = pd.DataFrame(APPLE_STOCK_PRICES)
    i = random.choice(prices.index)
    prices.loc[i, "open"] = pd.NA
    prices.loc[i, "close"] = pd.NA
    return prices


@job
def stocks_job():
    apple_stock_prices_dirty()

In the above example, we defined a toy job (stocks_job) with a single asset, apple_stock_prices_dirty. This asset returns a pandas DataFrame containing the opening and closing prices of Apple stock (AAPL) for a random week. The _dirty suffix is included because we've corrupted the data with a few random nulls.

Let's look at this job in the UI:

Pandera job in the Dagster UI

Notice that information from the StockPrices Pandera schema is rendered in the asset detail area of the right sidebar. This is possible because pandera_schema_to_dagster_type extracts this information from the Pandera schema and attaches it to the returned Dagster type.

If we try to run stocks_job, our run will fail. This is expected, as our (dirty) data contains nulls and Pandera columns are non-nullable by default. The Dagster Typ returned by pandera_schema_to_dagster_type contains a type check function that calls StockPrices.validate(). This is invoked automatically on the return value of apple_stock_prices_dirty, leading to a type check failure.

Notice the STEP_OUTPUT event in the following screenshot to see Pandera's full output:

Error report for a Pandera job in the Dagster UI